The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  ‘Who else?’ I asked.

  He gave me half a dozen names; some I could have forecast, others were a surprise. Then he said: ‘You remember Lyn Elliott-Smith?’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  Bruno nodded. ‘I always think of her as the kind of woman who gives adultery a bad name.’

  This was indeed true. Lyn Elliott-Smith’s husband had really become a classic figure of fun; he put up with Lyn because he had to (being a senior civil servant for whom divorce was unthinkable), but it cost him dearly in the process. It had reached the stage now when he was afraid to walk into any room unannounced, for fear that Lyn would be in bed with his best friend, on the sofa with a casual caller, on the mat with the butler. Thus, as he moved about, in his own house or in any other, the poor fellow whistled and sang from morning till night; he coughed in every corridor, shuffled his feet outside every door. But it was no good; he still kept tripping over his best beloved in every conceivable attitude of abandon.

  Just for once, I hated the idea of Jonathan in bed with this curling snake of a woman; and I hated him more for betraying me thus far.

  ‘What happened with Lyn?’ I asked.

  ‘I understand it was rather hilarious,’ answered Bruno. ‘I understand’ usually meant that he was embroidering, if not lying outright, but now I chose to believe him. ‘They say that George Elliot-Smith came home, positively booming out the 1812 Overture, as usual, and Lyn called out: “For Christ’s sake stop that bloody singing!” and he thought she must be alone, and he trotted upstairs rather too fast, and Jonathan had to skip down the fire escape with his trousers gaping in the breeze …’ Bruno, pleased with his recital, stood up, preparing to take his leave. ‘If he’d only stopped to think, he really needn’t have bothered. George would always have zipped them up for him.’

  That night, when Bruno had gone, I actually roughed out a piece for the column, starting: ‘Jonathan Steele, now in strict training as South Africa’s guided muscle–’ and then I tore it up. If it were all true, the thing either hurt too much, or it didn’t hurt at all – in slight sad confusion, I couldn’t make up my mind which. But either way, I wanted to bury it; and anything except a silent disposal seemed silly and unworthy.

  Chapter Twelve

  It must have been about five months later that Eumor rang me up from Johannesburg.

  It was an office call, about ten o’clock in the morning, a product of one of those rare occasions when Eumor and I were in business together; he had acquired four hundred tons of Bulgarian caviar which he wished to unload upon a defenceless public, and mine was the glowing prose which was going to do it. (‘So different from ordinary caviar!’ was our eventual, utterly truthful slogan; we polished the whole lot off in about six weeks.) When we had finished the business side of our talk, and were gossiping (at eight shillings a minute) Eumor suddenly said: ‘By the way, Kate, have, you heard about Jonathan?’

  ‘Jonathan who?’ The query was almost a genuine reaction; I had not seen him even casually for half a year, nor thought about him for weeks.

  ‘Sans blague! Jonathan Steele!’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard all I want about Jonathan Steele.’

  ‘But about his book?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard all about his book, too. I just can’t wait.’

  Eumor seemed somewhat mystified. ‘You mean, you want to read it?’

  There was something in his tone which communicated interest, and indeed alertness. ‘Start again, Eumor,’ I said. ‘What about his book?’

  ‘It is a success already,’ said Eumor importantly. ‘It has been chosen. And in America also.’

  This was difficult to translate. ‘You mean he’s finished it?’

  ‘Certainly he has finished it! Some few months ago. Now it is chosen. By the Book Society. And it will be a serial story in America. I have read it. It is wonderful, Kate. So wise. But I told you he was good.’

  ‘Who’s serialising it in America?’ I asked, slightly knocked over in the rush.

  ‘A magazine. To do with the Pacific. But not about the sea.’

  ‘The Pacific Monthly?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  That really brought me up short, in spite of a prolonged, cast-iron refusal to be impressed by anything that Jonathan Steele might do. If Eumor had his facts right, it was sufficiently astonishing that Jonathan had produced a book at all; and a ‘choice’ by the Book Society argued (if nothing else) a respectable standard of saleability, as well as a positive guarantee that the book was not trash. But the Pacific Monthly was something else again. Unique in America, its consistently high standard, and crotchety insistence upon quality, meant a total absence of the second-rate; quaintly, it only hired writers who could coax the right words into the right sequence; having nailed the word ‘literate’ to its masthead, it kept it there, in all its baffling nudity. If Jonathan had made the Pacific, then he had made a lot of other things as well.

  There had to be some mistake, if only to keep me happy.

  ‘Are you there, Kate?’ asked Eumor presently.

  ‘Yes. I’m just being astonished, that’s all … Eumor, you said you’d read the book. Do you mean, in manuscript?’

  ‘No.’ Eumor struggled with the technicalities. ‘It was printed. But with brown paper.’

  ‘You mean, page proofs? In a brown paper cover?’

  ‘Yes. They have printed five hundred copies like that, to send to people in advance.’

  This was another whole series of surprises, which I appreciated even less. It meant that Jonathan must have finished the book at least two months ago. It meant that, in spite of the oddest evidence to the contrary, he had been working all the time. And a page proof distribution of five hundred copies indicated that his publishers were behind the book, and the author, in a very big way indeed.

  I wasn’t feeling guilty yet, but I had an idea that it would not be delayed very long. I fought valiantly against the process, which would leave me self-convicted as a damned fool, and a solitary one also.

  ‘What’s it like, Eumor?’ I asked as grudgingly as I could. ‘It isn’t really any good, is it?’

  ‘It is beautiful, Kate.’ His voice had a sudden warmth. ‘I told you it would be, a long time ago – do you remember? It is about politics, and the locations, and people in Johannesburg, and how to live together. It is about a young man who comes to South Africa. There is a girl like you in it, too.’

  Eumor was slowing up, struggling once more with the exact sense of what he wanted to say. ‘Kate, I have lived here thirty years. I have watched everything, I am not blind. But I tell you, this book taught me twice as much. And all the same, it is more like poetry than a book.’

  ‘Why did he give you a proof copy?’

  ‘I am his friend.’

  I don’t know why I found the satellite phrase moving, and shaming at the same time; but it was so, in swift and almost unbearable measure. Eumor was his friend, I was not. I had withdrawn my patronage, for all sorts of perfectly good reasons; but I had withdrawn it. Nearly a year had passed since we had been lovers; during all the happy time together Jonathan must have been working faithfully, and during all the time since then also – unhelped by me, dismissed as a poor man and a liar … I had been working too, of course … I had made £9,000, and enjoyed myself a great deal … It wasn’t going to be possible to formulate any of these ideas properly, until I had read and assessed the book; but however disciplined I might be, however sulky and proud, a childish refusal to be impressed was no longer a plausible reaction. Every ostrich, sooner or later, came up for air – fresh, fantastic, mortifying air. If this, incredibly, were to be my astonished-ostrich phase, I had better face it, with all the grace that God allowed.

  ‘Eumor,’ I said. ‘I’d like to read that book. Can you organise it?’

  ‘Immediately! I send it down.’r />
  ‘But, Eumor – don’t tell him.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Eumor, meaningly.

  ‘All right – ah!’

  I still envy anyone who reads Ex Afrika for the first time.

  As all the world knows, it is not a long book; by a remarkable feat of compression (bearing in mind the huge canvas of Southern Africa, the byways and digressions that beckon all the time) Jonathan Steele had kept his story down to 70,000 words. I remember one critic who remarked on that fact in a particular sense: ‘Seventy thousand words,’ he wrote, ‘and not one going to waste, not one which does not do the work of ten, in sheer magic evocation.’ Disallowing that terrible word ‘evocation’, used nowadays for everything from cigarette ads to old horse-race commentaries, the man was exactly right. Jonathan had watched, thought, felt and lived his book for a year, and then distilled his story down to a concise, poetic belief, which had, for almost everyone who read it, a shattering reality.

  I am not sure what I had been expecting to read; I had been led to forecast a phoney book, and part of me, indeed, was hoping to be proved right. Even as recently as Eumor’s telephone call, when he said: ‘It’s about a young man who comes to South Africa,’ and added something about there being ‘a girl like you’ in it, I had been anticipating some atrocious by-product of the confessional; a subject piece, conceived in the guts, sucked from the thumb, and stuck together with self-regard.

  It would be, I thought, a sort of ‘What Awful Africa Did to Me’ diatribe; one of those exhibitionist sagas which really belonged in the realm of indecent exposure, along with all tomes written by poets’ widows with left-over lives to kill, women whose husbands died of throat cancer, reformed drunks, unreformed society whores, and ladies exposing for sale their many-splendoured things.

  I had been wrong, all wrong. Ex Afrika was a beautiful book, and a discerning one; when Eumor, once again, had said that it taught him twice as much as he knew before, I was ready, after reading it, to sign my name under the same testimonial. I read it in one gulp – there was really no other choice – and then went back again and started breathing and licking it in, word by word, picture by picture, in purest self-indulgence.

  It was Africa in little – people, places and things seen in their customary raucous confusion and then reduced to order and sense by a craftsman’s eye. It was about a young man who came to Africa; a young man who could look around him with a childish sense of wonder and an adult capacity to drink deep without getting drunk; who saw what the people were doing to each other, and why they were doing it, and when it had gone wrong, and how it should go right – if … The ‘if’ was love, I suppose, or common sense or decency or terror of bloodshed.

  But the book was not a sermon. It was better than a sermon. It was a piece of mankind held up for inspection – inspection from all conceivable angles, like a jewel of many polished facets, none more flawless than another; a jewel of a book, indeed, presented in all the dimensions which skill, love and pity could encompass.

  There was one astonishing thing about it, which only dawned on me slowly. I kept meeting sections of it with a sense of partial recognition, thinking subconsciously: But it wasn’t like that or I didn’t mean it that way or He’s right, only he is still unfair. I then realised that I had played more than one part in the book; not just as ‘the girl like me’, a sometimes flattering, sometimes bitchy portrait which I had to admit was extremely well done; but in the more unexpected realm of politics.

  The book, where it bore on race relations, was wise and compassionate; and where it condemned things-as-they-were, it – I was going to say, it pulled its punches, but that wasn’t quite the tactic; rather did it concede (astonishingly for a red-blooded radical like Jonathan) that there might be two sides to this gory question, that all white men in South Africa were not automatically dolts or brutes, and all black men were not God’s elect and mankind’s undoubted masterpiece.

  Father Shillingford, for example, was there, but not as Jesus Christ cycling sadly through the Transvaal; rather as a good but baffled man, who might, with the very best will in the world, precipitate a series of horrifying disasters, simply by upgrading the facts to suit his own generous heart. (In a location riot, for example, the ‘Father Shillingford’ of Ex Afrika was responsible for at least four extra deaths, because he gave asylum in his church to a Negro thug who, if he had been a white man, could never have excited a moment’s pity or even common tolerance.)

  It was these ‘second thoughts’ of Jonathan’s that I found fascinating. They proved that he had been listening, a year earlier, he had been listening to everybody, however unlikely – myself, Eumor, Bruno, Lord Muddley, Gerald Thyssen … The book was brilliant, anyway; and it made wonderful sense, instead of being the slick-talking trash I had feared – or, at one ignoble stage, hoped.

  But it was also balanced, in a way I would never have conceived possible, bearing in mind Jonathan’s surface fixation about the rights of man (Sub-division ‘Black, Enslaved’). The things that I and the others said in defence of ‘our side’ had taken root; sometimes they were laughed at, sometimes they were out-argued, but at least they were there, they were given a chance. The result was a novel of African life, as exciting, sane and rounded as it could well be. It was also the rarest thing of all, in any book about South Africa: it was hopeful.

  When I had finished Ex Afrika again, at the second reading, I thought afresh: so he was working all the time, after all; he was working when he was happy with me, and when lonely and unhappy without me, and playing poker, and talking to Father Shillingford, and getting into police trouble, and wandering poor and proud … No wonder he had been preoccupied and unaccountable; to him, the book was all, and (like myself and my own job) he wasn’t going to have it sabotaged by any heavy-treading third party.

  He had been telling the truth all the time, putting to shame all complaints and suspicions. I wished above everything that I could have been more help – for notwithstanding what I had given him, it was fair to say that he had written the book in spite of me.

  It was now desperately important to find out if it were too late.

  ‘Desperate’, I found, was an appropriate word to use. I finished Ex Afrika on a Friday afternoon, and it happened that I was going to the ballet that evening. Thus it was a foolish piece of erotica, as well as the magic of the book, which impelled me to ring Jonathan up, after nearly a year of silence. During a not-very-good Lac-des-Cygnes, I became conscious, for the first time, of the ill-concealed endowments of the male dancers, which seemed to be exhibited, in extraordinary prominence, especially for my discomfort.

  It was very unlikely that any of the saucy young gentlemen on the stage would have wished to cause me a moment’s worry in this department; but I knew one who would, and, in an overwhelming invasion of sexuality, primitive and undeniable, which took me out of the theatre at the interval, I knew that I had to have him, and it, and those, immediately.

  I excused a frantic hankering by assuring myself that love would be there also.

  I rang up Johannesburg as soon as I got back to my flat. After a long delay, when I feared that the continuous ringing at the other end was going to make me cry, there was a sudden click, and a native voice answered: ‘Master not home.’

  ‘Don’t ring off!’ Instantly afraid, I almost shouted the words; it must have given him the shock of his life. Then I remembered his name: ‘Alfred?’

  ‘Yes, missis?’

  ‘Where is the master?’

  ‘Master not home.’

  ‘But where is he? Is he out?’

  ‘Master out, yes.’

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘Don’t know, missis. Master gone away.’

  It was a bad moment to hold an African conversation.

  ‘Where has he gone to, Alfred?’

  ‘Cape Town, missis.’

  ‘Cap
e Town!’ I really must stop shouting. ‘Whereabouts in Cape Town? I’m ringing up from Cape Town now.’

  ‘Yes, missis.’

  ‘Did he give you a number, Alfred?’

  ‘Master out, in Cape Town.’

  I tried four hotels in as many minutes, and I found Jonathan at the fourth one. He sounded surprised, and rather sleepy at the same time. At least, I hoped it was just sleepy. It was very important that he should not be in the least drunk.

  I said: ‘Drop everything.’

  I could almost hear him smile; it had been one of our accustomed signals. ‘I will if you will,’ he answered.

  ‘I’m dropping everything now,’ I said.

  I was trembling already, damn it.

  ‘At the very most, you have twenty minutes’ start,’ said Jonathan.

  It was a wonderful re-encounter. Indeed, approximately four million people learned exactly how wonderful it was, because he used the whole thing three years later in a disconcerting novel called Wrap-Around, and I was readily identifiable. But even if I had known that particular piece of exploitation, I would not have minded, nor hesitated. Girls are grateful creatures, and suddenly all that I was, was a girl.

  We had some catching up to do, after the first wild wordless homecoming; but amazingly little, bearing in mind our total separation of nearly a year. Exquisitely relieved, we revelled in the happy parallel of getting up-to-date. First there was the book – now, in a sense, a top priority of both our lives.

  ‘It’s wonderful, Johnny,’ I assured him. ‘I was amazed when Eumor told me about Pacific Monthly, but I’m not any more … And you were actually working on it all the time. That’s what’s so incredible!’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, seeming to be genuinely puzzled. ‘I told you I was writing a book.’